Les Brodeuses (Sequins)

Pretend for a moment that a film is nothing but an aesthetic object.

Then the aesthetic core of Sequins (Les Brodeuses) is the 120-second sequence around minute 36: the heroine looking at a piece of sequined embroidery. The camera glides over the piece, sliding gently in and out of focus. The frame cuts back to the heroine’s eye seen up close, then back towards the piece. Soft notes of Martinet’s wave suggest the clinking of trembling sequins. It is very beautiful.

Anyone interested in art textiles recognizes this scene as a very good depiction of what happens to us from time to time in front of a particularly beautiful piece. Everyone else will probably be challenged by the scene and pleased to get back to the plot when it again resumes.

That may be one reason why the scene is only 120 seconds long. Hard-boiled textile fans like me would not mind it to last 120 minutes; but presumably such a film’s mass appeal, and therefore commercial value, would not be very high.

In fact, such a film – of exquisite beauty – about Japanese silk kimono textiles has been made by Fujitsu; I saw it in Maebashi in 1992; it is nowhere to be seen or found, for any money. No one markets it because, presumably, there is no market for it; or at least the films owners do not think there is.

Perhaps this is not quite right: today, internet marketing makes it possible for very small projects to be economically viable: it is cheap and easy to target narrow interests such as textile collectors. But Canal+ and the other sponsors of Sequins do not usually want anything that micro-focused. It is OK for any project they sponsor to feature Monteverdi arias or sequined embroidery – they are not Visigoths; but they also need the mainstream usual: plot, drama, especially love drama, best if fulfilled in the end. (And it is).

But perhaps that conventional content (and it is very conventional: an older single woman dealing with her only son’s tragic death; a younger single woman trying to decide whether to keep her baby) also serves as a setting for the central scene, the way a ring might set a stone, the face the eye, the body the face, the altar its statue; the way swathes of dull Miltonese set the far-in-between moments of utter and disarming beauty. The aesthetic rule number one is that a beautiful object’s setting must be duller than it itself, or else it will exhaust the eye and steal the show.

Not that the film is dull – it is all visually very beautiful; and the story is touching and well and intelligently told. But aesthetically speaking, everything in the film is duller than this sequence. As well it must: its beauty is difficult to match.

(2/8/09: Good bye, South, Good bye has the same sort of aesthetic core: the four minute motorcycle ride through the hills around Chia-yi, the director's ultimate nostalgia trip; and mine, too)